Download Music For iPod – Do I Have Choices?

Whenever a revolutionary product comes into the marketplace it and often creates its own demand structure. I don’t want to sound too complicated but it’s true-let me briefly explain. Before the iPod era there was a plethora of MP3 haphazard quality download sites. With the coming of the iPod, Apple provided what is arguably the best downloaded interface on the net. This has revolutionized the way and expectations of how we download music.

Effectively the bar was raised!

However what we have seen is that many of the “older” download sites that sprang up are still around and these provide free music (more on this later!).

Okay, so how do I go about getting music for the iPod?

Well quite simply you have three choices:

1. You can buy directly from iTunes and other pay per tune sites.

2. You could look for torrent files (these represent many of the dodgy files that I talked about earlier-please don’t use this option!!)

3. You can source your music from an unlimited download site.

Let’s look at choice number one.

iTunes is highly recommended for those users who do not do a lot of downloading, who do not worry about their budget and prefer to stick to a “known quantity”. To give you an idea as to how expensive downloading individual tunes can be I have about 7000 tracks from my CD collection on my iPod. Luckily, it’s a 30 Gig model so it still has plenty of space-and that’s my entire CD collection. Okay, I have already paid for the albums and singles but just imagine if I had paid for all that music in one hit, at least $7,000!

Hypothetically, if you downloaded just two tracks a day (which is pretty average)-you’re looking at $800 in the year!

What you may not have realised is that while it is relatively easy to transfer CDs into the iPod, it is virtually impossible to transfer music that you’ve bought online onto a CD as you need special software for that. So, in some ways I actually prefer the old way of putting a CD of songs onto my iPod because I feel more comfortable with this option.

What about choice number two – The “free” option?

I have yet to come across anything in life that is truly free. The reason why I don’t like this option is because many of the so-called free sites specialise in transferring other “nasties” along with the file that you download in the form of viruses and Trojans-it’s just too much hassle to sort problems out if these occur.

Now we get to choice number three.

You may now be asking what is an unlimited download site? Well I think, that I would not be giving you all the available choices if I didn’t give you this option. You probably are not aware of this option but it’s a good halfway house solution to the potential heavy cost of using pay per download sites.

If you’re more Internet ‘savvy ‘ you will already know that many of these unlimited download sites rely on P2P networks for the files. I know that you’re going to say that this option is no better than choice 2 but it does have some substantial differences which make it worth considering. Since these sites are competing with the major players in the market they have to be competitive and that means they have to provide excellent quality, ensure that all files are free from viruses, and have an extensive database for the user to search and download from.

These sites come in two categories, monthly subscription or a one-off lifetime membership fee. The one-off fee is possibly the best value for money because the lifetime membership should cost no more than $40 whereas a monthly subscription site will cost between 10 and $15 a month for the same thing.

To attract business many of these sites allow you to download an unlimited amount of music for iPod use.